Hi Balázs and Mina,I think there is no straight line in between the school levels because there are too many factors here. For instance, you can have a great enthusiastic professor, who understand Wikipedia, teaching a classroom with a very bad average level of students, whose contributions to Wikipedia won't be that great (and in Brazil, according to some professors I've talked since I joined the university, there can be a considerable level of fluctuation on the level of the students for each school term). Or you can have a professor that doesn't interfere or get involved with activities on Wikipedia, but we have good contributions of good students. Both cases happened here. There are several other possibilities if we think of the variables involved in such system, like infra-structure, students maturity, Wikipedia community reception (for instance, the Portuguese Wikipedia is much less welcoming than the Arabic one, and even the English), cultural background, experienced Wikipedians support etc..When I started to plan (although without time) the education program in Brazil, I have consciously chosen the top universities (usually public). Firstly, that would increase the probability of having a good average level of the students, which for me it is an important condition to have motivated students and good contributions. That could also help with media: if I have some of the trendy universities, that makes life easier to get news and get professors from other universities that aspire the top ones to do the same. I think the media attention can also happen when you show very poor regions and create a case around it, mainly if it is successful.From an open call we made here for the education program, there appeared some professors of lower level universities (although the focus were top ones), and I could check, after visiting some classes and seeing the results, that students had more difficulty to create original content - so they had to translate and adapt, which is easier. In some cases students can even find difficult to write proper Portuguese, as several friends of mine, today professors, have told me and I've seen with my eyes when some students from low level universities call me to teach basics math (that they should learn at school, for instance).I've heard from WMF colleagues sometimes at American universities that doesn't rank among the top ones had sometimes really good contributions, more than some top ones, and that is not that difficult to explain when we think about students motivation to be in a classroom and what is the motivation to edit Wikipedia or simply share knowledge.If you want sell a program and that you are a charity organization, using somethings I mentioned can help, like fancy photos and a good communication work. (Just think why the most watched movies in the world are watched. :) Even so, if you think on the challenges to make things happen in some places (like Namibia, Brazil and I guess your countries), we have really to register and learn the most we can from it. And we can use these cases even for the global north, you can good to poor regions of US and Europe and say: look, even people from Namibia and Brazil are using Wikipedia, shouldn't you use as well?Tom
2013/7/13 Mina Theofilatou <theoth@otenet.gr>
> Balázs, with all due respect to both Epukiro and the Smithsonian, the initiatives that lie somewhere in-between the charm of rural settings and the clout of established institutions don't grab attention as easily. Check out blog posts tagged "global education program" at the WMF Global Blog and you'll see them (unfortunately two of us - at least that I know of - were not awarded scholarships for Wikimania to share our work and interact with other Wikimedians and educators)
>
> Mina
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